Sunday, July 17, 2005

Mark Driscoll

In a previous post on the top 50 churches in America, I'm sure a number of readers didn't recognize the name of Mark Driscoll, pastor of Seattle's Mars Hill Church (which has grown from 9 to 4000 in 10 years) and founder of the Acts 29 Network ("A network that helps plant Gospel-centered, missional, church-planting churches to a postmodern mindset"). He is also the author of Radical Reformission: Reaching Out Without Selling Out (Zondervan, 2004)--a book I started this afternoon and hope to finish before I go to bed. He also has a book in the hopper with Zondervan, explaining how Mars Hill became a missional megachurch.

For what it's worth, if more emergent-type pastors and churches were like Driscoll and Mars Hill, there wouldn't be much to complain about. Theologically sound and missional minded. Why is that so hard?

Here is a profile on Mark from a couple of years ago in the Seattle Times Magazine.

Update: Here is an email from Driscoll to fellow pastors in his network, encouraging them to stay on mission and not become bitter Calvinists, despite his frustration at those who are "drinking from the emergent church toilet." For more, see this post by Steve McCoy.